Finding someone who claims to be able to develop custom integration, features, or other upgrades to Interspire Email Marketer is very easy. A quick trip to elance, freelancer, odesk, etc will find you dozens of developers who claim to be proficient. While our team here at IEMAddons.com would love to bid on any of your custom development requests we also want to help you not get taken by the wrong developer. Here are some tips:
Interspire Doesn’t Always = Interspire Email Marketer
A lot of developers list “Interspire” among their core proficiency. Even if that is the case they still may have little to no experience developing for Interspire Email Marketer. Just as popular as Email Market (if not more so) is Interspire’s shopping cart / ecommerce product often referred to as “Big Commerce.” A lot of developers have experience building templates and payment modules for the ecommerce product but know very little about Email Marketer.
Addons Are Tougher Than Editing Core Files
A lot of the good developers can find the core files of your installation that need to be edited to acheive your goals and make the changes. Interspire Email Marketer was setup to allow developers to develop and add addons to the system without editing the core or stock files of the program. In most cases (although not all) the best developers can work on building out your requested customization in the form of an install-able addon. Why do you care? If you do any future custom development or purchase any pre-built addons or custom code for Interspire it will get more and more difficult for these things to work together if they are not addons. Also, if/when Interspire rolls out a new version of Email Marketer, upgrading is going to be far more difficult if you have been editing all the core files.
Communication Skills Are Critical
When hiring any developer for anything it is essential that you both be able to communicate. That means they must speak and write the language you wish and have professional skills in terms of the frequency and timing of communication. The burden is also on you to provide very detailed instructions and expectations when you bid out the job and work on the project together.
Read Their Reviews And Look For Your Hot Buttons
The best advantage of freelance types of websites is the ability to read the past reviews of each developer. No developer is perfect but as you read through the reviews you can probably ascertain what their strengths and weaknesses are. Weigh these against what is most important to you. For example, if you are on a deadline then timeliness may be the most important thing to you.
Ask for Examples and Demos of Past Work
Even after reading review and doing research always ask a developer to provide examples, and where possible a live demo, or similar work they have done in the past with Interspire Email Marketer. If they tell you that their agreement with a past customer prevents them from showing you a demo of the work you should still insist on seeing at least screenshots.